It is known in the art of electrical circuitry design that the placement of signal carrying conductors in close proximity to one another often causes certain signal interference problems. Such signal interference is due to the electromagnetic field generated by the signal carried by one conductor inducing an unwanted signal in a closely adjacent conductor in accordance with known physical principles. Such signal interference, sometimes known as "crosstalk," is particularly troublesome in designing circuitry for electronic communications and data processing equipment. A desired way of eliminating the aforementioned type of signal interference is to design circuits wherein the conductors are arranged as pairs of wires twisted one around the other, one wire being the signal carrying wire and the other wire being the circuit completing or ground wire.
IN ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS USING CONDUCTOR WIRES CONNECTED TO TERMINALS BY WRAPPING THE WIRE END IN A SERIES OF HELICAL CONVOLUTIONS ON THE TERMINAL, OR BY USING MECHANICAL CONNECTORS IT IS NECESSARY TO PREPARE PAIRS OF TWISTED WIRES HAVING INSULATION REMOVED FROM THE END PORTIONS. Heretofore, twisted wire pairs or other twisted multiple wire conductors have been prepared by manually cutting and stripping insulation from pretwisted pairs of wires or from twisted pairs supplied in one continuous bulk quantity. Such manual preparation of wire pairs for complicated electrical circuits is costly and undesirably slow. Moreover, the correct length of wire and the correct length of the stripped portion of the wire is difficult to achieve consistently with manual operations.
It is also a problem in the preparation of twisted pairs of conductor wires to rapidly and accurately provide precut lengths of twisted pairs wherein one wire end is offset longitudinally with respect to the adjacent end of the other wire of a pair. Longitudinal offset is required in many circuits due to the location of the respective terminals to which the individual wires of a twisted pair are to be connected and due to the routing of the wire on the terminal board. The use of twisted pairs of conductor wires in increasing quantities for assembling electrical circuits has presented a need for apparatus which can rapidly and accurately prepare quantities of twisted multiple conductor wires cut to predetermined lengths with insulation removed from the wire ends, and with adjacent ends offset longitudinally one from another.